Main Course · Austrian
Austria’s most ordered dish: thin veal pounded flat, coated in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, and fried in clarified butter until the coating billows and blisters. The name is legally protected. Only veal is Wiener Schnitzel.
Austrian food law has been unusually firm on one point since 1975: a Wiener Schnitzel must be veal. A pork version is Schnitzel Wiener Art, meaning it follows the technique but not the original meat. The distinction sounds pedantic until you are standing at a menu in a Salzburg Gasthaus trying to decide. The veal version has a more delicate, fine-grained texture and a richer fat. The pork version is cheaper and nearly as good. Both are cooked the same way. The menu is required by law to tell you which is which.
The technique is what defines the dish as much as the meat. The cutlet is pounded to about 3-4mm, a thickness that would seem to leave nothing, then salted, floured, dipped in beaten egg, and pressed into fine fresh breadcrumbs. It goes into hot clarified butter in a pan deep enough to let the coating float free of the meat surface as it cooks. This separation is intentional: the coating puffs, blisters, and develops the wellige, wavy texture that marks a correctly fried schnitzel. A schnitzel that lies flat against the meat has been fried wrong, in too little fat or at too low a temperature.
Served with a wedge of lemon and a plate of potato-cucumber salad (Kartoffel-Gurken-Salat), dressed with vinegar and a little oil. The lemon is not a garnish; you squeeze it. The salad is light and slightly acidic, which is exactly what the fat from the butter requires as a counterpoint. No sauce. Schnitzel does not need sauce.
Stiftskeller St Peter, Stieglkeller, and Hotel Goldener Hirsch are among the reliable Salzburg addresses for a correctly made version. Every traditional Gasthaus in the city has it on the menu. The difference between a good Schnitzel and a mediocre one is mostly fat temperature and breadcrumb freshness, which is not always visible from the outside of a restaurant.
Where to find it
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Salzburg's most storied luxury hotel, on the Getreidegasse since 1407. Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein, and countless conductors, singers, and heads of state have stayed here. The preferred hotel of the Salzburg Festival world.
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Claimed to be the oldest restaurant in Europe, documented since 803 AD. Located at Stift St. Peter, tucked into the Mönchsberg cliff. Mozart is believed to have dined here. Still run in association with the Benedictine monks.
